Travis Manion Foundation · Philadelphia & Boston · 2020
TMF's annual "If Not Me, Then Who..." Gala is the event that funds their mission of equipping veterans and families of the fallen to lead. When COVID-19 made an in-person event impossible in 2020, they didn't scale back — they asked SkyGrass Media to build something more ambitious: a fully scripted, broadcast-quality virtual production built to carry the weight of the real thing.
Full-service — producing, directing, and shooting. Nine on-camera principals across two cities: General Joseph Dunford, Alex Gorsky (CEO, Johnson & Johnson), Rob Riggle, and six additional subjects. Locations spanned the Union League of Philadelphia to private residences in Boston. The deliverable: a 14-segment broadcast with custom graphics, branded lower thirds, and rolling credits — built to feel like the gala it replaced.
The Virtual Gala aired December 10, 2020 to TMF's national Spartan community. TMF reported their strongest year on record — more new members, stronger partnerships, greater mission impact than any prior year. What began as a crisis of circumstance became a testament to mission-driven production craft.
Vienna Teng · "We've Got You" · Raleigh, NC · 2024
Vienna Teng returned with her first album in over a decade and a premise that bordered on conceptual art: two standalone songs that, played simultaneously, form an entirely different third. Each song needed its own video — and the two, combined, needed to produce a coherent third. Our role: produce and shoot the live-action component in coordination with an independent stop-motion project, then architect the combined film.
Sole producer and DP alongside director Steve Milligan. Six dancers. An apartment set dressed entirely in white paper, engineered to peel away in-camera to reveal color beneath. Every prop food item built from origami by hand. Every angle designed for compositing with Andrew Benincasa's stop-motion animation. Two shoot days to hold two lighting worlds — the cold clinical white of the opening, and the warm saturated transformation it becomes.
The trilogy works on three levels at once: each video independently complete, relationally dependent, and collectively greater. Vienna Teng's fanbase responded as invited — watching all three, tracing connections, finding where the animated and live-action worlds breach each other's walls. It is exceptional filmmaking, and it shows what music video production can be when the cinematographer and the concept are working at the same level.
Kellum Law Firm · Wilmington, NC · 2017–Present
In 2017, Kellum Law Firm's formula was working. Norman Kellum's authoritative on-camera presence had made him one of the most recognizable faces in North Carolina legal advertising — tight frames, sharp delivery, credibility you can't manufacture. The brief: capture that presence, make it count in thirty seconds, do it again. Neither party knew it would become an eight-year partnership through the most disruptive period in production history.
Three eras. The early work built around Norman — teleprompter setups, clean direct address. Then the visual language expanded: location b-roll, motion graphics, stock. Now: ARRI Alexa 35 paired with AI-generated motion imagery. The lawyers still appear on camera. Real crews still work. The AI layer extends the visual scope far beyond what the budget could justify alone — spots that read like $100,000 productions at a fraction of that cost.
Kellum Law Firm now runs spots that compete visually with firms spending multiples of their budget. Eight years in, the partnership continues to evolve. The technology changes. The standard doesn't.
Vernon Rudolph is a cinematographer and director whose work spans feature films, commercial campaigns, corporate films, narrative shorts, and documentary production. He founded SkyGrass Media on a single operating principle: that precision in craft and clarity of vision are not constraints — they are the conditions for remarkable work.
With roots in both technical cinematography and collaborative direction, Vernon approaches every production as a controlled creative act. He doesn't just deliver a brief. He interrogates it, expands it, and returns something that exceeds what was imagined.
Available for commercial, corporate + narrative projects worldwide.
Currently booking Q3 & Q4 2026.